My first job was an agent for an oil firm which had its main office in Pittsburgh. It may have been the only one I could get, but I rather imagine that my droolings and dreamings over the wondrous flames of the foundries of Pittsburgh invested the work (in my mind) with romance and took away (in the minds of my relatives) the sting of my having to be called a salesman. The first month I made one sale. Overjoyed at getting an order for a thousand barrels of oil, I signed a contract to deliver them at a certain time f. o. b.—Cincinnati. Harvard College had taught me many things, but had neglected to give me any idea whatever of those letters, “f. o. b.” My salary was fifty dollars a month, the freight was sixty, so I quit at the end of the month, owing my boss ten dollars.
I considered the matter closed and that I had learned a good lesson; but, unfortunately, I had had a large amount of business stationery printed. Thinking my young cousins could use it to draw on and desiring never to see it again, I sent it home. But I had reckoned without my dear mother’s sense of economy. For years I was forced to receive letters from her with
After this not very profitable occupation I turned my attention to tutoring, fitting a boy for West Point, and another for the Yale Scientific School. The former was the son of an ignorant Irishman and had got a limited amount of information at the Jesuit school. I taught him geography, history of the country and states, of which he knew nothing, and I made him learn the Declaration of Independence and simple mathematics. He went in with flying colors.
I found that my business career did not interfere in any way with my social life in Cincinnati. I was still anxious to be an artist and was painting in my bedroom every night. The city was, even at that time, beginning to be an art center for the Middle West. Nicholas Longworth, grandfather of the husband of Miss Alice Roosevelt, had shown a particular aptitude for making money and a better one for spending it the right way. As a young man he had climbed the hills of the town and, looking from them across the water, decided it would be impossible for the city to extend in but one way. Accordingly, he put his savings into land, always keeping one lap ahead of the spread of population. Caring for beautiful things, he began to encourage the fine arts, and it was at his home that I saw my very first collection of oil paintings. Concord was the home of the steel engraving, and the copies of oils that my father had brought back with him from Europe and hung up in the Old Manse swore at everything else in the house. The Longworth collection was mostly German pictures—by Koeck-Koeck, Meyer von Bremen, and two by Lessing of the life of Huss, the martyr, which were evidently worthless, but so aroused my decorative instinct that I remembered them for years after.